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Game Changers

Game Changers: Alyson Walker

Photo: SANDRA KONG

A
lyson Walker was just starting to develop her career path when, not long after joining Royal Bank of Canada, she had a colleague ask her if she woke up every day thinking about money. If she did, the colleague said, she should stay in finance. If not, she should leave.

Walker left — and her departure led her first to jobs in media and later to work in sports.

Alyson
Walker
MAPLE LEAF SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
She landed her first sports job with Canada’s Chum Media as a business developer, and when CTV bought the company in 2007, they put Walker in charge of a team managing digital advertising for the 2010 Vancouver Games. The Games were a huge success for CTV, and Walker was recruited afterward by Canadian Olympic Committee CEO Chris Overholt.

She joined the COC in 2010 and played a central role in taking the organization’s post-Vancouver sponsorship haul from $35 million over a four-year period to more than $140 million over a four-year period. It did so by renewing top sponsors such as RBC, Bell and Hudson Bay Co. and adding new sponsors BMW and Canadian Tire.

“She’s as good as anyone I’ve seen at building teams and structuring teams,” Overholt said. “She’s also a really good strategic thinker and was huge in helping us think through what as an organization would appeal to [a sales target] around strategy.”

Sales success like that caught the eye of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment CEO Tim Leiweke. He began recruiting her before the Sochi Games, and she recently decided to make the move, joining MLSE to help the company’s teams shift their sales and content focus from broadcast to digital.

— Tripp Mickle

  • Women in sports business you’d most like to meet: Billie Jean King: I’d love to understand how someone who had the courage to stand up for women in sport truly thinks and conducts business; Heidi Ueberroth: Anyone responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue is interesting to me; Maria Sharapova: I admire the ability to compete at the highest level in the world and to build a global brand.
  • Best advice received: “Play like a man, win like a woman.” (Stacey Allaster, chairman and CEO of the WTA)
  • Career turning point: Achieving unprecedented success from a sponsorship and licensing perspective at the Canadian Olympic Committee from 2010-14, despite many critics suggesting sponsorship dollars dry up after hosting an Olympic Games at home.
  • On the iPod/musical interests: I love a good mix of classic rock (The Band, the Stones, U2); hometown favorites (The Tragically Hip); and newer indie rock (Broken Social Scene, The Lumineers, Of Monsters and Men, Ben Howard).
  • Outside of work and family, I’m spending a lot of my time on … : A bike, skis, a field, a yoga mat.

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